This class will grapple with literary, visual and media texts that represent and theorize violence on a transnational field. We will consider the representation of pain as an industry and as a cultural phenomenon. Drawing from critical race theories, queer and psychoanalytic theories, and transnational feminist work, this course analyzes pain/violence narratives from a wide range of genres--film, essay, memoir, and policy--to explore how pain and violence is narrated and depicted and how such narrations become part of a collective consciousness that keeps systematic forms of oppression intact.

The goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? What is the nature of the work of becoming that is involved, and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors enable or curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

What does it mean to be a man? Or to act like a man? By calling attention to the gendered identities/practices of men-as-men, scholars of masculinities have given diverse responses to these questions across time and space. We draw on anthropology, history, critical theory, gender studies, and media to explore the processes and relationships by which men craft gendered lives. Rather than defining masculinity as biological trait or fixed object, we examine how men's life stories and prospects are shaped by social scripts, political-economic forces, labor regimes, and ethical norms.

This seminar focuses on the social institutions and symbolic meanings of gender, sexuality, family, and the household through the lenses of race, culture, and historical contexts. We will study how understandings of masculinity and femininity, the orientation of desire, sexual acts, and sexual identities impact gender roles in the household across various cultural and social contexts. We will ground our work in historical and ethnographic research on the connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, capitalism, and gender, sexual relations, and the family.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

An introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.

Why do non-binary pronouns make (some) people so angry? How do pronouns regulate our relation to the world, to one another, and to gender? This seminar investigates the history of theoretical reflection on and literary experimentation with pronouns. How does the constitution of the "I" grant access to the symbolic order? How does second-person address produce ethical relationality? How can the enunciation of the "we" avoid coercion and instead model flourishing, robustly multiplicitous community? Can the singular "they" circumvent the traps of gendered language? Readings in poetry, gender theory, linguistics, philosophy, political thought.

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement. We'll read widely, from the most realistic depictions of the American political process and the varieties of immigrant experience to the work of afrofuturists and feminists. The personal is the political and our frame will range from the global to the domestic. We will write stories that inhabit experiences other than our own. This course will allow students to make interdisciplinary connections between courses on history, politics and identity and creative writing.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

This course explores the interplay between genre and gender in 20th and 21st century Japanese cinema. This task entails, as described by Christine Gledhill, reconfiguring their relationship "not in terms of social reflection, ideological misrepresentation, or subject positioning but as cinematic affect and discursive circulation between society and story, public and imaginary worlds." We will study how various film genres translate gender discourses and ideologies into aesthetic experiences, and how gender's aesthetic and imaginative power brings genres to life as dynamic processes of cultural production and social transformation.

This course explores feminist pedagogies and praxis across East Asia, focusing on historical practices of political and social activism, collective action, community work, and healing, care and self-discovery. It investigates how these practices, whether explicitly framed as feminist and/or pedagogical, have constituted powerful forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power, particularly those of masculinity and hetero-patriarchy. By studying historical contingent and concretized forms of pedagogy, we aim to gain a greater understanding of feminist pedagogies as complex, embodied and social processes of knowledge-making.

This class explores the underside of civility: the indifference of good manners, the controlling attention of caregivers, the loving coercion of family, the quiet horrors of neighbors, friends, and allies. We will explore characters in fiction and film whose militant niceness exercises killing privilege or allows for the expansion of their narcissism...people with "good intentions" who nonetheless wreak havoc on the people and the environment around them. We will consider "niceness" as social performance, as cultural capital, as middle-class value, as sexual mores, as self-belief, and as affective management.

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

In received tradition there are no women authors writing in English before the very late 17th century, with a very few notable exceptions in the Middle Ages. This course charts the recovery and revaluation of early modern poetry, drama and prose by women. We'll learn how significant it is and enjoyable, as we encounter works that range in subject from the harrowing death of grown-up daughters, highly original philosophy, bold political verse and critiques of slavery. We'll consider all within frameworks provided by contemporary gender and race theory and history.

The New Eve is a distinctly modern creation, a radical and arresting re-imagining of her mythical original, the first woman venerated as the mother of humankind and blamed for its fallen humanity. We read the literary works of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, James Joyce) and directors (e.g., Fritz Lang, Jane Campion) alongside psychoanalytic case studies and contemporary works of feminist, critical race, and trans theory to think anew Freud's notoriously unanswered question, what does a woman want. No prior knowledge of critical theory is required.

This immersive, multimedia course invites us to come to our senses in creative ways, exploring climate crises like melting ice, rising oceans, deforestation and displacements. We will come alive to hidden worlds, kayaking the Millstone and trips to Manhattan, engaging animal and environmental studies. Through film, images and writing, we explore the vital ways environmental issues intersect with gender, race and sexualities. Themes include: wilderness; national parks; violent settler colonialism; masculinities; militarization; Indigenous knowledges; animal intelligence and emotions; slow violence; the commons; and strategies for change.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

This trans-historical course looks into three moments (antiquity, 16th c., and 19th-20th c.) to explore the connections between lyricism and same sex desire. With Sappho and her reception as a starting point, the readings and discussions focus on the poetry of the Pleiade and then modernist poetry from Baudelaire and after. Together with the cultural context regarding gender and sexuality, the course approaches lyricism's expression of the self in relation to an exploration and questioning of one's gender and sexuality, but also the lyric as the privileged genre for expressing socially non-normative desires and positions.

"Weimar" stands in for a potential that was lost, for the problem of revolution and reaction. A century after the Weimar Republic's apex, we first pick up on the negative political analogy between pre-fascist Weimar and our time: the U.S. as a "new Weimar," "the crisis of parliamentary democracy," the rise of White Supremacy, the "agitator," and the danger of pluralization. Second, we will study the positive analogies between Weimar as an era for revolution and experimentation. Embracing the materiality of the body and the built world - in dance, architecture, sexuality studies, and social history - we also aim to dis-analogize Weimar.

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of gender and sexuality studies. How do gender and sexuality emerge from networks of power and social relations? And how are they entangled and co-constituted with other axes of identity such as class, race, and ability? As we survey a wide variety of writers, texts, issues, and methods - historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical, artistic and scholarly - we will engage the diversity of thought and approach contained under the rubrics of feminist, gender, sexuality, and queer studies as foundation for further work in the field.

This seminar offers an intensive introduction to working with cultural documents emerging within and from LGBTQ+ communities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Students will work individually and collaboratively as they engage a broad array of cultural texts and primary documents from the later 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Students will rehearse how to interpret, analyze, and contextualize such documents of the recent queer past as they also explore how to apply these skills within historical, literary/cultural, and dramaturgical analysis.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

This course explores the construction, imaging, and experience of the racialized Latinx body while considering modern regimes of power. It examines legacies of White supremacy and Coloniality in relation to cultural production and the Latinx body. This course's pedagogical approach is rooted in Chicana/o Studies and will examine power in relation to Latinx and other communities of color--it does not focus on Mexican/Latinx communities exclusively. When analyzing power, it recognizes the importance of contextualizing visual, audio, and embodied performative representations of culture to understand how the body constantly speaks back to power.

This course explores the relationship between gender and power through an analysis of "practices of craftsmanship" of so-called rebellious Latin American women who were seen as witches, traitors, even monsters, but also as enchanters, healers, and creators. We will examine women's skills, artistry, and agency, often dismissed as "malos saberes" (bad knowledge) in literature, performance, songs, and the visual arts. Starting with an exploration of witches in colonial times, our journey includes mythic, literary and cultural figures such as La Malinche, Frida Kahlo, Gabriela Mistral, and Doña Bárbara.

The course is an introduction to the rich tradition of Latin epic, and to the study of allusion as a literary technique. We will focus on the motif of the descent to the underworld, from Vergil to late antiquity (Claudian) and the renaissance (Petrarch, Vida), with particular emphasis on Vergil's account of Aeneas' journey to consult the shade of his father, and the epic of the early empire (Lucan, Statius, Silius). The pace is designed to allow students to build skills in reading Latin epic poetry.

This course explores ethnographic approaches to the study of gender, Islam, and inequality. It surveys the theoretical approaches used to study the intersection of religious practices, gender, and sexuality. Topics include religious women's agency; queer and transgender agency; self and subjectivity; religious law, ethics and politics; governance and the state; and progress, secularism, imperialism and modernity.

Sexism, misogyny, and gender injustice are grave moral and political wrongs. This course covers a range of key topics in feminist political philosophy that are still essential to contemporary issues. What is oppression? What is sexism? What is gender? How does intersectionality complicate our understanding of these questions? We'll also consider more specific political issues that feminist philosophers have grappled with. What does a transnational feminism look like? Are professions which are primarily gender-based compatible with justice? What policies are appropriate to address a gender division of labor?

This course explores the lives and representations of women in Muslims societies from early Islam through modern contexts. Using varied sources, from scripture, religious, legal and historical texts, letters, novels, poetry, and film we will consider topics including women's piety, slavery, marriage and sexuality, feminisms and LGBTQ identities, and the experiences of non-Muslim women in Muslim societies.

The course examines the gendered racialization of Asian American women. It identifies and interrogates experiences of everyday violence, looking at their hypersexualization, labor market precarity, intimate partner violence, and poverty. It situates the discussion in the law, family, workplace, and campus community.

As the economy shifts, who wins and who loses? This seminar, taught by a top NPR editor, will arm students with critical skills to analyze and write with clarity about the role economics plays in shaping our lives. From everyday decisions like who to date, where to travel, or what to buy, the economy also impacts us in significant ways over time, depending on our race, gender or class. Students will learn to synthesize complex ideas and also how to frame, structure and write clearly and concisely.

In this course, we will study the works of feminist-identified scholars and performers to examine how they use different mediums to excavate, stage, and theorize lives that place, front and center, the relationship between (P)olitics, embodied knowledge, and creative expression. Examining works in theater, students will learn about different forms of feminist practice and how those forms may support and conflict with each other. Students will also learn how to incorporate and articulate theories and mediums into their own creative practices.

From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.

This course will explore film and visual arts made by and about people who identify as women, trans and/or queer in dialogue with feminist and queer of color critique. Our course will center a transnational, intersectional and comparative perspective that will allow us to think about multiple social movements, styles and aesthetics while centering the lives of people who have experienced the cost of homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny often while fighting against other forms of colonized oppression such as racism and poverty.